Ernst Brücher

Ernst Brücher (born December 8, 1925 in Berlin ; † November 12, 2006 near Munich ) was a German publisher of art books .

Life

youth

Ernst Brücher was born in 1925 to Paul Joseph Brücher from Sulzbach and Elisabeth Marie Pick from Dresden. The parents, although not originally from there, were respected members of Berlin's pre-war society. Ernst was the youngest of five siblings, including his sister Hildegard Hamm-Brücher . After the parents' early death, the siblings were brought through the war separately from their guardians in various boarding schools, until Ernst was brought to a camp shortly before the end of the war as a so-called "half-Jew" - his mother was Jewish - where he was on his older brother Dietmar met. Together they managed to escape in the last days of the war.

He experienced the end of the war in Bavaria, from where he first worked as a courier, then as a journalist. Brücher studied German and art history. He wrote for several newspapers and magazines, as well as a then published but lost book with the title "Tür und Schwelle".

Professional background

After a stay in France, where he worked in the mine, and in the USA, where he and his brother Dietmar explored work opportunities in technology and teaching, he married his childhood sweetheart Majella Neven DuMont and moved with her to Cologne. There they had four children. In Cologne, Ernst started as an assistant to the management at DuMont-Schauberg and quickly took over the management of the printing works (newspapers, gravure and commercial letterpress). Print orders for high-quality art books from abroad were already being processed here - due to the recognized quality performance of the printing companies.

Career as a publisher

Since the DuMont-Schauberg-Verlag , at that time only known as a newspaper publisher, had historically always been associated with a book publisher, the idea of ​​the international publishers Fritz and Andreas Landshoff , friends of international publishers , to re-establish a book publisher, found open ears.

In 1956 DuMont Buchverlag was founded and Ernst Brücher became its publisher. Again very quickly found a congenial co-founder and publishing director in the form of Karl Gutbrod (son-in-law of the artist Willi Baumeister ), and thus the start of what would later become the most prominent, successful and publicly effective art book publisher was already under a good star from day one. (This role of the most prominent art book publisher was only taken over by Taschen Verlag , also in Cologne, at the beginning of the 21st century .)

Since almost every kind of international cultural exchange was prevented under the National Socialists, and so - in addition to its own "degenerate" artists - also many other names and developments had passed the German public by, the first, risky task of the publishing house arose by itself: To open the eyes of the artistically interested public.

To this end, a number of ways were redeveloped almost en passant, which are now taken for granted in the publishing industry: Large illustrated monographs on individual artists with close-ups of individual parts of the picture, large pictorial encyclopedias covering entire art eras, calendars such as the "Golden" or "Art" that have shaped entire industries , the series of “DuMont documents” (large flap brochures), reprints of portfolio works, original editions developed by the artists themselves, or the now legendary travel guide series “Art Travel Guide” and “Richtig Reisen”. From the beginning, one of the main pillars of the program was the “Black Series”, monographs on artists with selected color prints, which at the time had to be glued into the books by hand. For the art travel guide, a modified Goethe saying became one of the best-known slogans in the book trade: "You only see what you know."

Ernst Brücher also played a special role in conveying modern music; Composers like Mauricio Kagel , John Cage , Nam June Paik or Karl-Heinz Stockhausen counted him among their close friends. The intellectual and social stance of the program was then influenced by the takeover of the magazine "magnum", which had a style-forming effect in the years it was published in Germany.

Ernst Brücher's son with Majella Neven DuMont, Niko (* 1960), is a film producer and works under the name Niko von Glasow . Ernst Brücher's son Daniel Brücher (* 1954) has opened a bookstore in Munich-Schwabing after many years as a publisher and managing director of the German branch of Dorling Kindersley.

Honors

Ernst Brücher was awarded the Order of Merit of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia on May 10, 1991 .

literature

• Ernst Brücher and DuMont Buchverlag DuMont . DuMont, Cologne 1985.

Web links

• Obituary for Brücher in the Kölnische Rundschau, November 13, 2006

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Interview / "I get compliments". Retrieved August 17, 2019 . 
2. ↑ Merit holders since 1986. State Chancellery of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, accessed on March 11, 2017 .